There’s a strange unease that creeps in when life is calm. For most people, peace is the baseline, something they crave, but for me it has always felt unnatural—almost threatening. I grew up waiting for the rug to be pulled out from under me, waiting for the next blow-up, the next overdue bill, the next night the lights or hot water would shut off. Chaos was the rhythm of my childhood. It was the language spoken in my home. And when chaos is all you know, it doesn’t just shape you—it wires you.

That wiring runs deep. It means that when the world is quiet, my body doesn’t sigh with relief. It tenses. It scans for danger. It rehearses the “what ifs” before they ever arrive. And somewhere along the way, I realized that part of me even craves the very thing that hurt me: the unpredictability, the storm. Because chaos feels like home, even if it’s a broken one. It’s familiar. And familiar has always felt safer to me than foreign.

When you’re raised inside disorder, your nervous system doesn’t just adapt—it fuses to it. I learned to walk on eggshells, to read a room before I crossed the threshold, to predict moods before they erupted. That hyper-vigilance carved grooves into my brain. As a child, I thought that was normal. As an adult, I found myself replaying it, almost instinctively. I would mistake intensity for love, volatility for passion. I’d seek out relationships that mirrored the storms I grew up in, not because I wanted pain, but because my body whispered: this feels right.

My past relationship was exactly that. It carried the same jagged edges I was raised around—the highs that made me float, the lows that left me gutted. I mistook the push and pull, the uncertainty, the constant emotional negotiations as proof of depth. I confused chaos with connection. I stayed longer than I should have, because the cycle of rupture and repair gave me the same adrenaline as my childhood: that mix of fear and longing, the belief that if I could just manage it better, maybe I’d finally be safe. But that wasn’t safety. That was survival masquerading as intimacy.

Peace, on the other hand, felt wrong—like emptiness. I didn’t know what to do with it. I’d pick fights when things were too calm. I’d poke holes in moments of steadiness, as if stability couldn’t be trusted unless I tested it. It wasn’t that I wanted to sabotage—it was that my nervous system didn’t know how to exist without the hum of chaos in the background. That’s the trap of growing up in disorder: you don’t just tolerate chaos, you start to crave it, because it’s the only thing your body understands as home.

But the last 2.5 years, since moving away from Chicago, have been about unlearning that craving. Leaving wasn’t just geography—it was a severing. I stepped out of the place where my patterns were reinforced over and over, and I gave myself space to see them clearly. In my little one-bedroom apartment, I found myself sitting with silence I once couldn’t tolerate. No slammed doors, no sudden storms, no one pulling me into their spiral. Just me. Just quiet.

At first, that quiet made me restless. I felt the itch for the storm, the urge to create problems where there were none, to fill the stillness with noise so it felt more like the world I was used to. And in those moments, I had to remind myself: this itch isn’t truth. It’s conditioning. It’s my old programming reaching for what it knows.

Rewiring my brain has meant letting peace feel strange at first, letting it feel uncomfortable, but not running from it. I’ve had to practice sitting in stillness without labeling it boring, practice receiving consistency without labeling it fake. I’ve had to remind myself that stability is not a trick, that safety isn’t temporary, that love doesn’t have to feel like fire to be real.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, I’ve started to taste a new kind of craving—the craving for rest, for quiet, for the kind of life where I don’t need to anticipate disaster. I’ve begun to see that peace isn’t hollow—it’s full in a way chaos never was. Full of safety, presence, groundedness. It gives me space to breathe, to create, to be.

It’s still a process. There are days I miss the familiar burn of chaos, days I almost feel hollow without it, as if something is missing. But then I remind myself: that craving is the ghost of the life I survived, not the life I’m building now. It’s an echo, not a truth. And every time I choose peace over panic, stability over sabotage, I teach myself that the storm was never love—it was survival.

I don’t have to live in survival anymore.